


The Path of the Gray

by ASMillen



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka is a Gray Jedi, But this is not a love shot, Dragon Snake, Gen, Just a nice one-shot, Mentioned Kylo Ren, Mentioned Luke Skywalker, One Shot, Planet Dagobah (Star Wars), Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rey needs a teacher, Short One Shot, Suggestions of a Reylo-type connection, Swampy swamp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 03:44:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21487810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ASMillen/pseuds/ASMillen
Summary: After receiving pressure from Luke Skywalker's Force ghost, Rey finds herself on the swampy planet of Dagobah in an attempt to find Ahsoka Tano, an infamous rebel fighter. The elderly Togruta she finds may be the key to helping her sort out the mess the Force had awakened inside her.
Kudos: 14





	The Path of the Gray

The small, Rogue-class starfighter she had managed to fly onto the foggy, rain-soaked wasteland of a planet was close to a being nothing more than a bucket of bolts by the time she landed it at the edge of the swamp. It groaned as if it were a dying happabore as it touched down on the soft mud that seemed to make up the whole of the planet’s surface.

Rey snarled as she pulled off her pilot’s helmet and shimmied out of the barely-opened hatch, wishing more than ever that the hatch wouldn’t get stuck at the halfway mark of being completely open. Losing her balance, she almost fell flat into the grimy, dark brown mud, but she managed to catch herself with one small, gloved hand on one of the starfighter’s extended wing.

Looking out across the damp, desolate terrain, Rey suddenly found herself missing the golden sands of Jakku. She missed the warmth, something she knew she wouldn’t find on this planet. From what she’d heard from her fellow compatriots in the Resistance, Dagobah was known for being cool and damp during its wet season, which she supposed was almost better than being uninhabitably hot as it was known to be during its dry seasons.

Rey shivered as a cool wind dragged across the area, raising the gooseflesh on the bare skin not covered by her infamous arm wraps. Without a second thought, she grabbed her long, roughspun cloak from the pilot’s seat before sweeping the cloak around her shoulders and closing the ship’s hatch behind her. The too-thin fabric just barely kept most of the cold from reaching her skin.

After taking one cautious step forward and finding the ground was mushy but stable enough to walk on, Rey found herself traversing the swamp with heavy, thudding steps. As she hiked through the mire, she studied her surroundings, noticing the silvery beetles crawling along the Gnarltrees as long, dark-scaled snakes slithered amongst their branches.

Out of habit, Rey kept a hand glued to her blaster at all times, hoping she wouldn’t need to use it. Though her shot was much better than when she’d first fired the blaster, it still wasn’t much to compete with. Not for the first time, she found herself aching for the lightsaber she’d grown accustomed to in the short time she’d had it by her side.

_ If only it wasn’t still broken at the bottom of my knapsack,  _ Rey thought bitterly as her thoughts drifted back to what had occurred on the  _ Supremacy _ . As if she were still on that imploding ship, she felt the sting of burning ash at it landed on her skin, the acrid smell of smoke as it burned her nose.

She’d be lying if she said she didn’t feel a twinge of sadness every time she thought of what happened, but she was sure she’d chosen the right side. After all, her friends versus him was no choice at all, was it? Still, something inside her goaded her with images of a better way that they both could have chosen, together.

Rey shook her head with a low, disgruntled growl to clear her mind from its treacherous thoughts. She had to remind herself, again and again, that there were only two choices, and only one choice had been the right one to make. Besides, it was too late to change her mind now.

With a sudden burst of energy, Rey trudged through the muck with a newfound drive of purpose as she spied a small, almost-unnoticeable hut at the very edge of the boggy stretch ahead of her.

That had to be it.

It had to be.

No one else was foolish enough to live on such a grim and dangerous planet.

She had to be there.

Rey was almost halfway through the knee-deep swamp when she felt something trail against her leg. She looked down into the filthy water, eyebrows furrowing in confusion as she noticed something sparkling with bronze floating around her legs. Before she could even cry out, she was tugged underneath the swamp’s watery depths into a deep-spot in the gloom she knew would go over her own head if she were standing.

As the murky water filled her throat, choking her on its foul taste, Rey tried to close her mouth until she caught sight of what was dragging her beneath the bog’s surface. Her eyes adjusted to the watery darkness right before the creature zapped forward, preparing to take a heaping chunk out of one of her thighs.

It was a snake, though it was much bigger than any serpent she’d ever seen in her years of surviving in Jakku’s harsh desert. Just one of its fangs was two or three times longer and wider than her own forearm. She suddenly knew why she’d seen bronze in the water before she was tugged underneath: The snake-like creature had green scales with gleaming bronze fins.

As Rey tried to scramble away from the creature—trying and failing because she’d never managed to learn how to swim in the past year or so she’d been fighting for the Resistance—she recognized the creature’s bronze fins as a type of trick for the creature; if a traveler saw it while walking through the bogs, they might’ve thought it was a treasure, something they could plunder or scavenge.

She started to see spots in her vision as she realized she was running out of air—she hadn’t had enough time to gulp in a big breath before the creature dragged her underneath. A couple more seconds, maybe a minute at best, and she’d be unconscious, completely at the mercy of the creature whose tail was wrapped around her calves in an attempt to hold her beneath the surface.

Rey kicked her feet against the creature’s tail as she struggled to grab for her blaster and avoid the snake’s reaching mouth at the same time, but its grip was too strong, too unyielding; there was no way she’d be able to get her legs free from its tail without using the Force. She tried calling upon the Force, hoping that thing inside of her would wake and answer, but nothing answered.

Giving up on the idea of freeing her legs, Rey redoubled her efforts on the blaster. With a grunt, she finally managed to wrench it free as she started to feel a pounding in her head, something that made her feel light and heavy all at the same time, she clenched her finger around the blaster’s trigger, but nothing happened.  _ Water damage,  _ she cursed inwardly.

Fear spiked through her as the spots invading her vision began to turn into dark clouds and her struggles slowed to almost nothing. Just as she felt the darkness clawing at her mind, she saw white splicing through the dark, watery surface. The creature released her legs as the bright beams sliced through its green scales, letting a stripe of red loose into the water.

In her clouded mind, Rey muddled through the process of forcing herself to the swamp’s surface. She felt a hand on her back as she pulled herself up onto the damp ground and coughed up buckets of water into the ground. Warily, she turned her head to glance at the person whose warmth she could feel against her own wet, too-cold skin.

“Thank the Force.” With just a short look, she knew she’d found the person she was looking for, the person she’d flown across systems for. “I can’t believe I’ve found you, Mistress Tano.”

The withered Togruta’s eyes widened in a brief flare of surprise at the old name that had gone unused for decades upon decades. “How do you know of me, youngling?” she asked, her voice clear yet unsteady.

“Skywalker,” Rey managed to choke out as she felt another round of swamp water forcing itself up her throat. After letting the water rise up in a sickeningly sour rush, she turned around and leaned her back against a close-by tree as a sigh rose out of her chest. “Luke Skywalker.”

Ahsoka Tano, to Rey’s amazement, didn’t seem at all shocked to hear the legendary Luke Skywalker had sent Rey to her, even a year after his death. She simply quirked a corner of her mouth up in a slight smirk and said, “Of course.”

With a sigh, the Togruta stood from where she’d been standing before Rey and held a withered, orange hand. Rey let Ahsoka Tano help her to her feet before pulling her hand back so she could grab her blaster from the ground where she’d deposited it as soon as she’d broken through the surface of the water.

“What is that thing?” Rey asked as her eyes lit upon a gleam of bronze beneath the water.

“A dragon snake,” Ahsoka answered in a leisure tone. “You just happened to wander into its swamp.”

“You live in a dragon snake bog?” Rey nearly shouted, incredulous to her complete and utter nonchalance about the creature that had almost eaten Rey in one gulp.

“Yes.”

Without another word, she followed the Togruta into her home, where they both had to duck to slip into the slight, short frame of the entryway. Throwing off her wet cloak, Rey found herself a seat on a small, wooden chair in the middle of the room as Ahsoka went straight for the hearth and began working on a fire.

“Why are your blades white?” Rey asked before an awkward silence could descend upon the two.

“Because they are,” the older woman answered. “Why is your hair brown? Why are Kylo Ren’s eyes as dark as the night?”

Rey shivered, though she wasn’t sure if it was because of the cold seeping into her bones or the casual mention of Kylo Ren and his dark, dark eyes. “I’ve just never seen a lightsaber with a white beam.”

Ahsoka chuckled lightly. “I suppose they are unusual.”

When Rey turned to face the other woman, she noted the deep wrinkles embedded in her orange and white skin. If she remembered correctly, the Togruta female was older than Luke and Leia by seventeen years, give or take, yet she seemed to have held her own against the dragon snake.

Finally, Ahsoka managed to ignite a spark in the dry wood. As warmth flared through the one-room hut, the other woman answered the question Rey had been asking herself for the past few months. “Why did Luke send you to me?”

Rey had tried to answer the question herself so many times—she’d been trying to figure it out since Luke’s Force ghost had appeared to her and told her where to go—but she couldn’t even begin to guess at his reasoning until she’d seen Ahsoka’s lightsabers. That’s when it had clicked.

“I think he sent me here so that you could teach me the ways of the Jedi,” Rey answered doubtfully, wondering if the old woman would even consider the offer to train her.

“Why would he send you to me for that?” Ahsoka replied without a hint of venom in her voice. She watched Rey with eyes that told a story, a story that Rey couldn’t quite figure out. “I cannot teach you the ways of the Jedi, youngling, because I am not a Jedi.”

Rey’s whole galaxy flipped upside down at her words. She sucked in a sharp breath and turned so abruptly she almost knocked over her chair. “Then what are you?” Her hand crawled to the blaster at her hip before she remembered it was water-logged. “A Sith?”

“Force no,” Ahsoka protested with a wrinkled nose and a shake of her head. “I’m not a Sith, nor am I a Jedi.”

Rey’s brow crinkled in confusion as her pulse stuttered to a stop. “You can’t just—,”

Ahsoka cut off her protests with a sudden spirited laugh and said, “I can’t just what? Be something in the middle?” Rey felt a thousand questions burst up into her throat, threatening to squeeze past her lips before Ahsoka caught her gaze with sharp, blue eyes. “I see the struggle in you, girl. If I were you, I’d consider the middle ground, too, before you fall to a side you do not wish to find yourself on.”

Rey froze as the dreams she’d had in the past months came to life in her mind’s eye. She saw herself in a black cloak with the sleek, cold look of the Sith crafted into her features and a blood-red pike singing to life in her hands. It was a reoccurring nightmare, something she’d dismissed as a symptom of stress and fear.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Rey croaked.

“I know you probably more than you know yourself.” Ahsoka shook her head wistfully. “You remind me of someone from my past, from a life I abandoned so long ago that it sometimes feels like a dream. He was willful and confident and hopeful, but he did not control the Force as well as it controlled him, and it destroyed him.”

Rey had a sneaking suspicion she knew who Ahsoka was talking about. The sketch of an image of a man with a mask appeared in her mind. Suddenly, she was asking Ahsoka “Will you train me?” with all the urgency of a Jawa scavenging for discarded parts.

If the Togruta had eyebrows, Rey was sure they would’ve raised at her question as the other woman’s eyes widened and she froze in her attempts to bring the fire to a roar. “Do you wish for me to train you? After all, the Gray path is not the same as the Jedi.”

“I  _ wish _ to learn how to control this thing inside me,” Rey snapped without meaning to as something squeezed inside her chest. The dreams, nightmares, she knew what they really were: visions of the future, a future. “I need to learn before it begins to control me.”

Ahsoka nodded, though she seemed to be staring past Rey as she replied, “I can see how much truth is within your words, but you need to rein in your fear.”

“I thought you weren’t a Jedi,” Rey grumbled as she recognized the trademark of the Jedi order:  _ Fear is the path to the Dark side.  _ She’d read that somewhere, maybe in one of the Sacred Texts she’d stolen from Luke on Ahch-To.

“I am not,” Ahsoka agreed as she crossed her legs underneath her as she sat on the dirt floor of her hut, “but that does not mean that I do not recognize what fear can make us do.” Rey caught the old woman’s stare as she offered up a wobbling smile. “I have seen the choices people make when their fear is strong enough, not enough good things came out of those choices to make up for the bad.”

“Will you train me?” Rey asked again as she tried to ignore the strange sadness in the woman’s eyes.

“This will never be the Jedi order,” Ahsoka said as if that answered anything. “What I practice is a part of the Gray. It is in-between both sides of the force, yet it connects to them both intimately. Do you think you can handle that?”

Rey was unsure, but she answered with a simple, “Yes,” anyways, even as a small part of her whispered that Gray path that she spoke of was it. The new order Ben—No, he had been Kylo then, hadn’t he?—had offered to her, the choice they could have made together.

Pushing aside all thoughts of him and his offer of a galaxy to rule, side-by-side, Rey turned to her new master and asked, “What’s my first lesson?” She couldn’t pretend to miss the Togruta’s small, triumphant smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Not gonna lie, I only wrote this because it was bouncing around in my head after I started rewatching the Clone Wars TV show on Disney+. I saw Ahsoka being awesome and cool and was like, "Dang, her and Rey would get along so well," and then I thought, "Hey, doesn't Ahsoka become a Gray Jedi?" So, yeahhhh, that's where this came from.


End file.
